


Drawing gold from the dark (come inside)

by viverella



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Tattoo Parlor, F/M, Tattoos, implied past buckynat if you squint, tattoo artist Clint
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-11
Updated: 2014-08-11
Packaged: 2018-02-12 13:47:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 21,205
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2112240
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/viverella/pseuds/viverella
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>“Hey,” he says. He puts his most winning smile on his face and says cheerfully, “You here to make a bad decision?”</i>
</p><p>
  <i>The corner of her mouth curves upwards in a hint of a smile and she says in a soft voice that makes something jolt under Clint’s skin, “I was hoping to, yeah.”</i>
</p><p>OR: that AU in which Clint runs a tattoo shop that Natasha stumbles into one day and then keeps coming back to, and Clint gets maybe a little too invested and Kate teases him relentlessly.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Drawing gold from the dark (come inside)

**Author's Note:**

> thank _god_ I finally finished this fic. it's been eating my brain for most of the summer and I'm just so done with it. I've been weirdly apprehensive about finishing and posting this fic in the past couple weeks, which is part of the reason I'm so fed up with it probably and also why it took so long for me to write the last like thousand words or so, but I'm finally finally done and I'm still nervous about it but it's fine, it's fine, I'm done. 
> 
> I really REALLY love tattoo shop au's you guys and there's a shocking lack of such fics for this ship so I really just had to do one. let it just be known that my knowledge of tattoos and how tattoo shops are run is very limited and largely dependent on googled information, so if there are inaccuracies, please forgive me and feel free to point out any blatant mistakes so I can fix them!
> 
> also this is totally AU but also not so AU in some respects (especially re: their backstories) but I've played really, really fast and loose with their MCU and comics histories and kind of mashed everything up into one and added stuff in and took stuff out and messed around with timelines, so you'll be seeing elements of their canon histories in this but probably in totally the wrong places but we're just going to roll with it because I think it all works out in the end and I really love the depth that their canon histories give them.
> 
> (title borrowed from [this lovely tumblr poet](http://commovente.tumblr.com/post/89913662728/my-mouth-blessed%20))

These days, there’s not a lot that surprises Clint anymore. He’s pretty sure he’s seen it all at this point, what with the whole raised by carnies only to become a professional criminal deal. Or, well, a now retired professional criminal anyways. And in the four years since he settled down and decided to make an honest career for himself, Clint can’t say that he’s encountered anything more ridiculous or exciting than anything he’s already experienced (which is fine, because that was kind of the whole point of retiring, but, well).

Or at least, that’s what he thinks until late one day, when he’s sitting in the front of the shop sketching while Kate, the girl he brought on as his apprentice a few years back, tattoos an anchor onto some college-age girl’s ankle, and the door of his shop swings open and in walks one of the most beautiful people he’s ever seen in his entire life. His shop is a small one, just him and his one apprentice, mostly because his goal is to maintain a low profile in his retirement, and it’s an odd hour for a walk-in, late enough in the afternoon that it could almost be considered early evening and everyone is typically headed home or otherwise off to meet people for dinner, but she steps in expectantly like this is exactly where she’s supposed to be. She’s petite, even in the heeled boots she’s wearing, and she’s got curves that go on for miles, and her fiery red hair falls in waves past her slim shoulders, framing the delicate sweep of her jaw and seductive pout of her mouth. Her eyes flick around the drawings Clint has mounted all over the walls, careful and calculating like she’s assessing something, before they land on him, piercing and sharp and a brilliant, breathtaking green. 

It takes just a second too long for Clint to realize that he’s supposed to be saying something right about now. 

“Hey,” he says, setting his sketchbook aside and approaching the front counter that she’s lingering by. He puts his most winning smile on his face and says cheerfully, “You here to make a bad decision?”

The corner of her mouth curves upwards in a hint of a smile and she says in a soft voice that makes something jolt under Clint’s skin, “I was hoping to, yeah.”

Behind him, he hears Kate finishing up with the girl she’s been inking and sending her off on her way. 

“Hey boss,” she calls out to him across the shop. “That’s my last appointment for a couple hours. D’you mind if I pop out for something to eat?”

“I’m not sure if I have anything edible, but be my guest,” he calls back, and she shrugs and disappears into the back of the shop to venture up to the apartment he keeps on the floor above. Clint turns back to the woman who just walked in and smiles, jabbing his thumb in Kate’s direction and saying, “That’s Kate, by the way, my apprentice. And I’m Clint. I own the place.”

The woman nods and her eyes dart away from his face for a second, as if considering carefully what she’s going to say next. “Natasha,” she says finally, and even though her voice sounds steady and sure around the name, Clint wonders if her hesitation means that this is a lie. 

Clint keeps smiling anyways. “Well then, Natasha,” he says, leaning a little on the counter. “Do you have anything in mind for this bad decision of yours?”

Natasha’s mouth pulls into a smirk and she reaches into the pocket of her beat up leather jacket to pull out a piece of paper. “I do, actually,” she says and slides the paper across the counter for Clint to look. 

The design is simple. Clint counts fifteen lines at varying angles from one another, all intersecting at single point with notches along their lengths at precise locations. It’s not a large design, just smaller than his hand, and the simplicity of it is pleasing, and even though he doesn’t know her it all, it feels entirely too appropriate for her. 

“The pulsar map, right?” Clint says, realizing why the drawing in front of him looks vaguely familiar. “From the Voyager? That, um, the Golden Record?”

Natasha nods and leans her forearms on the counter, looking down at it thoughtfully. “And the Pioneer plaques,” she says. Her fingers drum lightly on the counter surface, restless. 

Clint frowns at her, considering, going over his schedule in his head to see if he has room to squeeze her in right now, because there’s something on edge about her, and maybe it’s the distressed condition of her leather jacket or the mud on her boots, but Clint can almost feel the flightiness radiating off of her (he does, after all, know the look of a person on the run, having been that person more times than he can count). He wonders what she’s running from.

“Do you want to do it right now?” Clint asks, because he’s worried that if he lets her go now with a promise of scheduling her in tomorrow, she won’t stay in one place for long enough to come back. She looks up and arches an eyebrow at him, but he just waves a hand, “This shouldn’t take very long and anyways, I don’t have any more appointments for a while.”

“Sure,” she says slowly, like she’s measuring out every word before she speaks. “Sure, yeah. Okay.”

Clint grins. “Great,” he cheers and grabs a clipboard from under the counter and hands it to her. “Here’s some boring paperwork for you to fill out, and I’ll be right with you.”

Natasha raises her eyebrow at him again, like she’s skeptical, but grabs a pen off the countertop as Clint goes to set the tattoo design on a piece of transfer paper. 

“Do you want it this size?” Clint asks, waving the paper.

Natasha’s eyes flick up to peek at him through her hair. “Yeah,” she says. 

Clint nods and moves to the back of the shop where all his supplies are, whistling cheerfully to himself. Kate slips back into the shop with a plate of leftover pasta in her hands and moves to settle down in the break room that doubles as his office and maybe make some coffee, raising her eyebrows at him and clearly questioning his motivations for squeezing Natasha in now even though they both know he’s got an appointment in about an hour. Clint shrugs. 

“She’s interesting,” he defends himself. 

Kate laughs. “You mean she’s hot,” she says. 

“Same difference?” he offers, which just makes Kate roll her eyes at him. 

When Clint returns to the front of the shop, Natasha’s leaning against the counter still, paperwork finished, and twirling the pen around her fingers like she can’t stay still. Clint wonders how much of the information she provided on her forms is actually real. 

“Where did you want this?” Clint asks as he leads her over to the chair so they can get started. 

“My upper back,” Natasha says decisively, shrugging off her jacket and pulling her long hair up into a tight bun, and it’s the first thing she’s said so far that Clint thinks is entirely the truth. “With the longest line pointing downwards.”

Clint sees with relief that Natasha’s wearing a tank top with thin straps and a low back, unsure if he’d be able to talk her out of her shirt if she’d been wearing something unsuitable for the tattoo she’s planning on getting. She has a tattoo on her left shoulder, faded like she might’ve done it herself, a sort of stylized solar eclipse, a ring of black warped and distorted on the outside like ripples of light. He has her sit in the chair and tip her head forward so he can wipe down the area and set the stencil, gloved fingers careful on pale skin. His left pinky brushes accidentally over a slight ridge of what looks like scar tissue on her shoulder blade, and he feels the muscles jump and twitch below her skin as if in surprise or discomfort. 

“You’re going to want to stay still,” Clint says quietly, removing the transfer paper from her skin and frowning at the lines, making sure they’re straight before he goes in with ink. He holds up a mirror so she can see the design. “This good?”

Natasha’s eyes are guarded and faraway but she nods. “Yeah, it looks nice,” she says quietly, like something in him startles her. 

Clint smiles and reaches out to position the chair so he can start working. “Okay, I’m going to need you to lie down,” he says, picking up one of the guns at his workstation and dipping it in ink. “Relax and try not to fidget, okay? And if you want to move, tell me, or I promise, as good as I am, I’ll mess up.”

“I don’t fidget,” Natasha says, but lies down on her stomach without fighting.

Clint chuckles and brings the gun to her skin. Natasha draws in a sharp breath when the tip touches her skin, and as Clint works, slowly seeing the piece come alive on her body, the tension gradually seeps out of her shoulders, relaxing inch by inch until Clint thinks he could describe her as something at least close to comfortable around him. 

“So,” Clint says, just to be conversational and fill the space between them with something more than the careful distance that Natasha radiates into the air around her. He nods at the solar eclipse tattoo on her shoulder. “There’s a story behind that, isn’t there?”

Natasha avoids his eyes, but her mouth tugs up a little into a crooked smile. “There could be,” she says evasively. “Or maybe I just like solar eclipses.”

Clint lets out a laugh but doesn’t press on any further, because he can all but hear her bristling under her skin, cautious. He shifts and taps on her back instead, asking, “What about this one, then? Why a map of space?”

Natasha lets out a breath that curls around a humorless laugh. She presses her lips together, and for a moment Clint thinks she’s just going to ignore him, but after a long minute, she says quietly, “I sort of… ran away from home recently.”

It sounds like an admission of something terrible and Clint doesn’t know what to make of it. “I thought only kids ran away from home,” he says instead of trying to think into what she could mean, remembering being young and lost and escaping to the bright lights and loud shouts of the circus because it was better than anything else. 

Natasha’s eyes turn up to meet his and he sees something vaguely familiar reflected back up at him, the scared look of someone far, far away from where they started. “Not if you come from a home like mine,” she says. She looks away again and murmurs, “I’ve been there for so long, it’s hard to remember who I am outside of all of that anymore.”

Clint swallows, suddenly too aware of his hands, and starts in on another line. “So then this…” he says towards her back. 

Natasha smiles, and it’s softer than the others she’s given him, more genuine somehow even though he really doesn’t have much of anything to compare it against. “Well, it’s a map home right?” she says, and there’s something hopeful about her, and Clint gets it then – it’s a wish, a promise to herself. 

Clint finishes her tattoo in a wordless silence, somehow feeling like something comfortable has bridged the space between them. Natasha breathes a little easier under his hands, if only just slightly, and by the time Clint finishes up about forty minutes later, she’s let her eyes slip shut, quiet and still and so much the opposite of the bundle of agitation that she was when she first walked in. 

“Finished,” Clint announces, wiping the area down, the crisp black lines standing out nicely against her fair skin, now red and swollen. He holds up a mirror for her to have a look. “What do you think?”

A slow smile spreads across Natasha’s face as she says, “That’s really good.”

Clint grins. “Glad you like it,” he says as he tapes a bandage over it and then peels his gloves off. “You’re the one who has to live with it for the rest of your life.”

Natasha laughs softly, the sound surprisingly gentle when she means it. She reaches to slip her jacket back on as Clint grabs one of the index cards he has printed with tattoo care instructions. 

“I’d keep that bandage on for at least a few hours so your skin can get a head start on healing,” he says, handing the instructions to her. “And you’re going to want to wash it at least once a day.”

Natasha reaches into her bag and pulls out a handful of bills and hands them over to Clint, saying, mouth curving prettily around the words, “I think I can handle that.”

Clint smiles and privately wonders as he walks her to the front of the shop why she’s walking around with what looks like several hundred dollars in cash and varying amounts of at least three other types of currency, but he supposes it’s not his place to ask. 

“Feel free to stop by if you’re ever in town again and feel like making another bad decision,” Clint says, leaning against the counter, somehow knowing she’s going to run the instant she’s out of sight. 

Natasha pulls her hair out of a bun and shakes it out. She shoves her hands in her pockets and says out of the corner of her mouth, “Maybe I will.”

And then she ducks out into the chilly New York fall air in a twirl of red curls and something vaguely light and floral and oddly smoky, and then she’s gone. Kate sidles up next to Clint and slides a cup of coffee across the counter to him. She lets out a low, appreciative whistle. 

“I see what you mean by _interesting_ ,” she says. She looks over at Clint with a slight smirk and asks, “Do you think she’ll be back?”

Clint shrugs. “Wouldn’t count on it,” he says, remembering the flightiness he could feel barely contained in her small body. 

Kate raises her eyebrows at him. “Do you want her to come back?” she asks in that oddly perceptive way of hers. 

Clint takes a sip of his coffee and pretends like he isn’t actively trying to avoid her eyes before saying, “I don’t see how it makes a difference.”

Kate rolls her eyes and bumps his shoulder with hers. “Of course it makes a difference, you big dummy.”

\---

It’s late spring the next time he sees her, some seven or eight months later. Clint’s bent over some large, burly man, working on covering up his ex-wife’s name on his bicep when the door swings open and a rush of warm air sweeps into the shop. Kate’s sitting at the front counter, noodling around on her phone, and she lets out a small exclamation of surprise. 

“You’re back!” she cheers, and the enthusiasm in her voice makes Clint curious. 

Clint lifts the needle away from the man’s skin and chances a look up, and sure enough, there Natasha is, wearing new leather jacket and mud-free boots this time. Her hair is pulled into a loose ponytail and dyed a few shades darker, and she’s got bangs now. Just different enough to make her unnoticeable in passing to anyone familiar with her previous look. On the run indeed then, Clint thinks. Successfully too, by the looks of it. 

Clint smiles. He’d probably think to himself that he’d almost started to forget about her if it didn’t feel so much like lying. 

“Hey,” he calls across the shop. 

Natasha turns the corners of her mouth up into a sort of playful smirk. “Hi,” she says. 

“I’ll be right with you,” Clint says, turning back to finishing up with what he’s working on. 

“No rush,” Natasha says, easy and warm. 

_Not like last time, then_ , Clint thinks, but doesn’t say anything, focusing instead on keeping his lines steady and smooth as he adds a curl to the tribal design that the guy in front of him chose to replace the woman he once loved. Clint can hear Kate talking to Natasha and then the sound of footsteps moving across the shop, but he’s not really giving it his full attention, just keeping his ears open. Old habits, he thinks, unable to stop himself from listening for anything remotely threatening. 

When Clint finishes up with the man, he wipes his arm down before bandaging it up and sending the man on his way. He cleans up his workstation before peeling his gloves off and walking over to where Natasha is, leaning against the counter alone now, Kate off rummaging around somewhere in the back of the shop. He leans on the counter across from Natasha and smiles. Now that he has the chance to properly look at her, he notices that he didn’t quite realize how haggard and exhausted she looked last time she was here. Her cheeks look less sunken and hollow this time, rosier, and she stands straighter, chin up, eyes sharp. Clint doesn’t quite know why, but it makes him glad in a warm way that he probably has no right to be feeling. 

“So, what brings you back to Brooklyn?” he asks.

Natasha shrugs. A lock of hair falls over her shoulder by her collarbone. “Work,” she says simply and smirks when she doesn’t elaborate any further. 

Clint laughs, trying not to sound like he wants to ask her more about it, and then shifts and asks instead, “So, what can I do for you today?”

Her eyebrow twitches up like she’s thinking about responding, but Kate chooses that moment to pop back up next to them and wave a sheet of transfer paper in Clint’s face. 

“Don’t worry boss, I already took care of it,” she says, and the look on her face is so smugly pleased that Clint shoves her shoulder just to get her to stop looking at him like that. 

“Stop trying to steal my customers,” Clint gripes as he snatches the transfer paper from her, but there’s no bite in it. As much as the two of them give each other shit, Kate’s clever and sharp and good with her hands and Clint doesn’t think running this tiny tattoo shop without her would be as fun as it has been the past few years. 

Kate shrugs and sits back down on the stool behind the counter. “It’s not stealing if they like me better than you,” she says, kicking her feet up on the counter and grinning. 

“No one likes you better than me,” Clint shoots back. 

A lesser woman would’ve suppressed the childish urge to stick her tongue out at Clint. Kate Bishop does it anyways. 

Clint rolls his eyes and starts to move back into the shop, nodding for Natasha to follow and hearing Kate laugh at his retreating back, teasing and familiar.

“Where did you want this?” he asks Natasha, frowning at the design. It’s a short phrase, just four words in what appears to be Latin, as far as Clint can tell, typed out in a simple but elegant serif font.

“On my bicep,” Natasha says, pointing to the inside of her right arm as she slips off her jacket and sits down in the chair. 

It’s discreet, Clint thinks as he wipes down the area and carefully applies the stencil to her arm where she indicated, flicking his eyes up to hers to confirm that he’s got it exactly as she wants before pressing the paper to her skin and dampening it to transfer the design. It seems all too fitting, he thinks, even though he doesn’t even know her and isn’t in any position to make this kind of judgment about her. There’s just something about her that, for all that she is beautiful and grabs and holds the attention of anyone she wants, feels unbelievably inconspicuous, as if she could melt into shadows right in front of you if she ever wanted to. 

Clint picks up the tattoo gun and dips the needle in ink. “So,” he says cheerily as he starts in on the first letter. “What’s this mean then – _‘fallaces sunt rerum species’_?”

Judging by the way Natasha’s eyebrows arch up towards her hairline, he probably did a pretty poor job reading the Latin words, but in his defense, it’s technically a dead language and he never really got much proper schooling as a kid anyways. 

“The appearances of things are deceptive,” Natasha translates. “It’s from Seneca.”

Clint doesn’t look up as he works, carefully inking in the first ‘a’ and asking, “Why’d you choose this phrase in particular? Seneca said a lot of important and interesting things, didn’t he?”

Natasha’s sudden laugh makes him jerk his head up, lifting the tip of the needle away from her skin as he does so because there’s something so startlingly delicate about the sound, and when she laughs, her eyes curve into two crescent moons and her whole face suddenly looks almost painfully young. Clint realizes with a start that this is probably what she was meant to look like, if she’d never had to encounter whatever it was that makes her look older and wearier than anyone her age should ever be. 

“Yeah,” Natasha says, the warmth of laughter still playing at the edges of her words. “Yeah, he did.”

Clint’s not sure why his comment made her laugh so much, but now that she’s started, he doesn’t ever want her to stop. 

“You didn’t answer my question,” Clint says, when he remembers to turn back to his work and actually do what he’s paid to do.

Natasha lets out a breath and leans back in the chair. “It seemed appropriate, considering my line of work,” she says. 

Clint snorts. “What, are you like some kind of spy or something?” he asks.

He chances a look up after he finishes with the second ‘l’ and is rewarded with a small smile. “Or something,” Natasha says mysteriously, green eyes reaching deep into Clint’s but revealing nothing of her. 

Clint clears his throat and looks away. He’s quiet for a moment as he starts in on the next letter, wondering why his brain suddenly feels like it’s filled with static. 

“If it’s your job to be deceptive,” Clint says when he can think clearly enough to string together a sentence, “Why advertise it on your arm?”

Natasha lifts her left shoulder up in a sort of one-armed shrug, a careful movement that doesn’t move her right arm at all. “I find that it hardly makes a difference,” she says, the weight slowly returning to her voice as she talks. She’s not smiling anymore now. “If I need to be someone else, then I just do it, and people will believe what they want to believe. If something doesn’t fit with their idea of the world, they edit it out. A tattoo like this wouldn’t even be a giveaway. People never expect you to be so blatant.”

Clint hums thoughtfully, frowning at the implications of what Natasha just told him. He wonders how much of her life is really wrapped up in pretending to be someone she’s not, wonders how often she’s had to create a new face for herself. A heavy silence falls between the two of them as Clint continues to work. It’s not necessarily uncomfortable, but Clint can feel the edges of where Natasha sets her boundaries, knows as if by instinct not to push any further, knows better than to stick his nose where he’s not wanted for once. Natasha tips her head back in the chair and stares up at the ceiling, and the only sound that fills the space is the constant whir of the tattoo gun. 

It takes about twenty or thirty minutes longer before Clint finishes and wipes down the area, the careful Latin standing out against her pale skin, rippling across her surprisingly strong muscles like an emblem of everything that she stands for. She smiles when she sees the finished product, the weight of her last confession lifting off of them, if only just a little. 

“Like it?” Clint asks, even though he can already tell in her face that she does. He likes hearing her say it, though; it makes something like pride but deeper swell up in his chest. 

“Yeah,” Natasha says, tearing her eyes away from her arm to look him in the eye. Her smile pulls a little wider. “Thanks.”

Clint grins. “Just doing my job,” he says as he bandages her arm up. 

She chuckles and grabs her jacket so she can reach into the pocket and pull out a handful of bills again. Clint peels his gloves off and takes the money from her, walking her out to the front of the shop and wondering why he finds himself dragging his feet, just a little. 

Clint leans against the counter as Natasha slips her jacket back on, and he says, “If you’re ever in town again—”

“I’ll know where to find you,” she finishes, chuckling softly to herself as she moves towards the door. She looks back at him over her shoulder as she pushes the door open and says, “I’ll see you again sometime, then.”

There’s something low and electric in her voice that makes something Clint has never felt before, new and exciting and not at all unpleasant, run like fire through Clint’s veins, pushing him to say, with maybe more intent than he means to let on, “I look forward to it.”

She laughs and slips out the door, quickly disappearing into the bustle of New York like mist disappearing in sunlight. Clint stares out the glass door after Natasha long after she’s gone, something odd knocking around his chest after seeing Natasha so casual and settled and softer around the edges, and Kate throws a crumpled up piece of paper at him from across the shop, hitting him squarely in the head. 

“You’re disgusting,” she says. “Just ask for her number if you’re so hung up on her.”

“Shut up, Kate,” Clint grumbles. “I’m not hung up on her; I just—”

“You just think she’s interesting, right?” Kate says, rolling her eyes. “Get your head out of your ass, Clint.”

\---

It’s four months later when Natasha comes crashing back into Clint’s shop. It’s September and it’s hot and sticky out and the heat makes Clint want to lie down and take a nap all day instead of actually working. He’s contemplating doing just that one day when business is slow when the door swings open and Natasha comes storming in. She’s got a beat-up duffle bag slung over her shoulder and her hair is a mess and her clothes are slightly wrinkled like she just got off a flight or a long drive or something, and there’s something hard and impassive in her eyes that makes Clint instinctively uneasy. 

Natasha slams her hand down on the counter and shoves a piece of paper towards Clint. “I need a fucking tattoo,” she all but growls, the rage in her voice startling him. 

“Whoa, hey,” Clint says, jumping up from the stool behind the counter in surprise, hands raised in a placating gesture. Natasha’s expression is dangerous, and he’s suddenly glad that he sent Kate out ten minutes ago to get them something for a late lunch. 

“Are you going to do it or not?” she snaps, eyebrows drawing together, and there’s too much hostility in her voice and something else that Clint can’t identify, tearing the edges of her words ragged. 

“Hey, calm down,” Clint says, trying to keep his voice level enough for the both of them. “Just relax, okay?”

Natasha scowls. “This is such a fucking waste of time,” she hisses, fingers clenching into fists.

A sudden spike of anger flares up in Clint’s chest at her comment, because who the hell does she think she is, barging in unannounced just to shout in his face when he’s done nothing wrong? He lunges out and grabs her wrist and pulls, making her stumble a few steps closer to him. Her expression turns startled, as if she hadn’t expected him to be able to move her like that, as if she’s not used to being pushed around if she doesn’t want to be. 

“ _Look_ ,” Clint says, voice sharp, not quite yelling but the hard edge to his voice is there anyways. “I don’t know what your damage is, but it doesn’t give you the right to come into my shop just to pick a fight. I’m not your fucking therapist and I’m not some drunk guy at a bar you can punch around to blow off some steam. I’m your tattoo artist, and this is _not_ where you come to stomp around on things so you can feel better about yourself.” Clint takes a deep breath to settle himself and continues, slightly more evenly, “Now, when I let you go, you’ll have two choices. You can either calm the fuck down and deal with your problems on your own time like a fucking adult or you can get the hell out of my shop.”

Clint slowly lets go of her wrist, watching as Natasha quickly draws her hand back to herself and stares at Clint with harsh eyes. She presses her lips together and her eyebrows are still furrowed, irritated, but she doesn’t move towards the door. 

Clint nods and picks up the piece of paper she pushed his way earlier. All that’s written on it is a single word in what looks like Russian. He holds up the paper. 

“You want it just like this?” he asks, already moving to get the design set on transfer paper. 

“Yeah,” Natasha says, still lingering by the counter, still bristling. 

Clint waves her in towards the chair. When he joins her a few minutes later, transfer paper in hand, she’s sitting and waiting for him and staring at nothing in particular, her jacket sitting on top of the duffle bag by her feet. Her toes don’t quite touch the ground. Natasha carefully doesn’t look at him when he sits down on a stool next to her. 

She turns her left arm towards him and touches a finger about an inch under the bottom edge of the solar eclipse design on her shoulder. “I want that here,” she says, and the irritation from earlier is still bubbling under the surface of her words, but she’s more contained now, consciously keeping it from spilling over and messing up the things around her. 

Clint nods. “This side’s the bottom, right?” he asks, just to be sure that he’s getting the orientation of the word right, though he’s seen enough Cyrillic letters in his lifetime to make a pretty good guess. 

Natasha nods once, and Clint sets the stencil. The letters are typed out and stylized prettily, a lovely blend of simplicity with just the right amount of flair to keep it from being boring. He wonders as he starts in with ink what the word means. 

Natasha’s quiet as Clint starts working, head turned away from him and eyes cast downwards. He has to remind her several times to relax her arm or his lines are going to get wonky, and every time, she presses her mouth into a thin line like she wants to say something but thinks better of it. 

“So who is it?” Clint asks as he starts in on the third letter. He feels Natasha shift her weight, and he turns his eyes up to smile at her gently, reassuringly, trying to tell her without saying it that he’s a friend and she can trust him (which, when he thinks about it, is a dumb thing to promise, since they hardly know each other). “The person who wronged you.”

Natasha studies him with narrowed eyes and says, “You don’t know that it was a person.”

Clint chuckles. “Course I do,” he says. “I’ve run a tattoo shop for over four years. People don’t just come storming in and demanding tattoos if they’re not either madly in love or they’ve been horribly betrayed in some way. And judging by that lovely display when you walked in, I’d say it’s the latter.”

Natasha huffs out a sort of bitter laugh and looks away again. She’s quiet for a long moment, but Clint has gathered from their interactions thus far that she’s the kind of person who likes to use the silence, likes to feel the weight of it so she can feel out where she stands. 

“I knew him,” she says finally. “A long time ago. I was a lot younger then.”

Clint waits for her to say more, and when she doesn’t, he nods towards the solar eclipse on her shoulder, prompting, “He the one who did that?”

Natasha looks down at the faded ink looping in a circle around her shoulder. She smiles, and it’s this soft, almost nostalgic thing that throws Clint off balance.

“Yeah,” she says, and her voice is more sad now than anything else. “He was always a little bit of a romantic, even after they’d stripped so much away from him. He always made things seem beautiful.” She pauses, presses her lips together for a brief moment before admitting, quieter now, “He always talked about the two of us like a solar eclipse. Breathtaking and painful to look at for too long and temporary. We both knew that we’d never be allowed to stay together if word ever got out – that rule was always very clear back home. But he spent a whole night doing this anyways.”

There’s so much hidden between her words that Clint can’t figure out, the secret truths that he suspects she’s never told anyone, and Clint’s so curious he could implode. He suddenly finds himself wanting to know everything about her, because what he told Kate that first day wasn’t a lie; Natasha _is_ interesting. There’s so much that she carries with her, the whispers she keeps tucked in the shadows showing in the constant tension between her shoulders. And yet there’s still _this_ , these brief moments when she unfurls in front of him, turning warm and gentle and so painfully _human_ that Clint sometimes gets afraid that one of these days, he’s going to do something stupid around her, like wrap his arms up around her, like press his mouth next to the raised skin where he’s left his mark, like tell her that thing that’s been on the tip of his tongue since she left his shop that first day (What is it? A confession? A promise?). 

“What happened?” Clint asks as he inks in the last letter in the short sequence. 

Natasha sighs. “They took him away from me,” she says, some of the anger returning to her voice, but not as violently now, more the low simmer of someone who has known too much pain. “And when I saw him again yesterday, he looked right through me. He didn’t know me at all. It was like seeing a ghost.” Her right hand presses on her abdomen just above her right hip like a painful reminder is there. “They’d taken so much away from me over the years, but I guess I thought that by getting out, I was stopping them from doing that to me again. Turns out I was wrong. They took away the last good thing I had left from my younger years.”

And Clint doesn’t even understand what any of this means, who this mysterious ‘they’ are, what Natasha means by taking away, but he knows the sound of a secret when he hears one, nods because he understands the feeling of losing things even if he doesn’t understand her story. 

“What does this mean, then?” he asks quietly as he finishes and starts wiping down the area. 

Natasha catches his eye when he glances up, and there’s something heavy in her gaze that makes Clint’s chest squeeze inwards. 

“Winter,” she says quietly. The corner of her mouth twitches up into a humorless smile, “That’s all we have in Russia when everything else is gone.”

Clint smiles back even though the gesture feels awkward on his face and bandages up her arm. Almost nothing she’s said today has made much sense, but Clint supposes she probably wasn’t intending to be very clear in the first place. Natasha offers him a small smile as she slips on her jacket and reaches into her bag to pull out some money. Clint catches a glimpse of what he thinks might be a handful of Euros as she picks out several twenties to pay for her tattoo. 

“Thanks,” Clint says, folding up the bills and tucking them into his pocket. He looks up at her as she stands to gather her things and says after a moment’s thought, “Hey, I love our special times together and all, but next time you stop by, maybe don’t come stomping in like you want to tear the place down, yeah?”

Natasha slings her duffle bag over her shoulder and smiles a little at him. “I’ll try to keep that in mind,” she says, and something in her voice is still dangerous but it’s not entirely unkind.

She walks across the shop towards the door as he cleans up his workstation, and as she’s slipping back out into the New York heat, Kate’s just walking back in, takeout from Clint’s favorite Thai restaurant in hand. Kate raises her eyebrows when she sees Natasha and glances back and forth between the two of them meaningfully. 

“Hey,” Kate says to Natasha, friendly but unable to stop herself from sounding surprised. 

Natasha raises an eyebrow at Kate too, and says much more evenly, “Hi.”

And then Natasha’s gone, slipping on a pair of sunglasses and blending into the crowd like she was born to do just that. 

Kate gives Clint a look as she walks over to him. “Why does she look like she’s running from something?” she asks.

Clint laughs and stands so he can cradle Kate’s head in his hands and press a kiss to her forehead (three years ago, Clint had come into the shop one day to find her upset almost to the point of tears over a fight with her father and he’d realized very suddenly that if there was one person in the entire universe he wanted to protect, it was Kate, because there’s something about her that reminds him so much of himself when he was still young and fresh-faced and he wants so much better for her than he’s ever had the same way parents tend to want better for their children. It’s an odd feeling, but over the years, it’s become sort of reassuring, a reminder that after everything he’s been through, he’s still capable of caring about another person, that there’s enough of him left to give). Kate makes a face at him and shoves at his chest. 

“Ew,” she says, her nose wrinkled in mock disgust. “Don’t do that.”

Clint ignores her and says dramatically as he grabs a takeout box from her hands, “Katie, in my experience, I’ve found that it’s often best not to ask criminals too much about their personal lives.”

Kate crosses her arms, a mischievous sort of smirk toying at her mouth. “So she _is_ a criminal?” she asks. 

Clint shrugs and goes to root around in the break room for a fork. Kate follows and leans on the doorframe, as curious and unrelenting as ever. 

“And how do you know what a criminal looks like anyways?” she prods, edging in on his less than legal past like she does every so often, inquisitive and nosy and every reason Clint picked her to be his apprentice in the first place. “And don’t give me any of that ‘In my line of work…’ crap. I’m smarter than that. I know when you’re lying.”

Clint smiles cheerily at her and says, “Come on now, Kate. You know I can’t tell you that. I wouldn’t want you to ever be compelled to testify against me in court.”

Kate laughs and shakes her head. “See, it’s that kind of comment that worries me,” she says. She smirks at him. “You’re lucky I don’t scare easily.”

“That’s why I love you,” he says, grinning as he flops down on the couch to eat his food and take a break. He doesn’t have another appointment for a couple hours and Kate is more than capable of running the shop on her own for a while. 

Kate rolls her eyes as she walks back out to the front of the shop and calls over her shoulder, “You’re the worst.”

\---

The whole point of Clint retiring from his previous career of the thievery of expensive and pretty things was that the trouble was getting to be too much and he didn’t want to be bothered by it all. At least for a while, anyways. Sometimes he thinks that sure, he’ll go back to it someday once he gets tired of civilian life, but for now, he’s rather enjoying not having to look over his shoulder every few minutes, wondering if he’s being followed by someone who could kill him in at least a dozen painful and creative ways. He’s always thought that if the time comes and he gets bored of this, he could jump back in whenever he liked. What he never planned on was being thrown into the fray by a woman he’s only met a handful of times. 

It’s December when it happens. It’s late and Kate went home hours ago when they finished up for the day. The shop floor is darkened and the front door is locked and Clint’s lingering around in the back of the shop doing the books like he does about once a month, which is why he startles when he hears the door noisily rattle open somewhere past midnight. He hears the door slam closed again and a patter of footsteps through the sudden rush of his pulse in his ears. He wants to believe that if someone’s come to rob him, they’d at least be smarter than to make such a racket, but he grabs the baseball bat he keeps behind his desk for good measure as he goes out to investigate anyways. 

“Hello?” Clint calls out as he ventures out into the shop. He can feel the chill creeping in from when the door opened. “Who’s there?”

There’s a rattling breath and a soft groan and as his eyes adjust to the dim light, he sees a figure leaning back against the door, slumped and slightly hunched over. Clint squints and lowers the bat.

“Natasha?” he says in surprise, reaching over to the wall to flick on the lights. 

He blinks twice, the sudden brightness momentarily blinding him, but sure enough, there she is, panting and leaning back against the door like her life depends on it. Her hair is cut messily short as if she’d hacked the long, curling ends off in a rush, and her expression is screwed up in barely suppressed pain. When Clint takes a closer look at her, he sees why. Under her two jackets and the heavy looking bag she has slung over his shoulder, there’s a huge tear in her right leg and a large red stain has spread halfway down her jeans. 

“You’re bleeding,” he says dumbly. 

Natasha huffs out a tense breath. “I need a place to stay,” she says, voice choked and strained. “Everyone I know is trying to kill me.”

Clint can’t stop looking at the state of her leg. “You’re _bleeding_ ,” he says again, because the snow that’s accumulated in her clothing has started to melt and a slightly pink puddle is forming under her feet. 

“I’m fine,” Natasha grits out through her teeth. Her eyes are narrowed and glassy. Clint wonders how much blood she’s lost. 

“Alright, well—Jesus Christ, Natasha, would you at least sit down? You’re making me nervous,” Clint says, unable to stop the frazzled tone from seeping into his voice.

Natasha makes a sort of soft grunting sound but she lets him help her over to one of the tattoo chairs, and he can’t help noticing the slight limp in her walk. He frowns at her leg. 

“You should really get that looked at,” Clint says as he pulls up a stool to sit next to her. 

Natasha glares at him. “Don’t you dare take me to the hospital,” she says, very seriously. 

Clint raises his eyebrows at her. “What, are you like a wanted criminal or something?” he asks, aiming for playful and only managing to sound mildly anxious. 

Natasha manages a slight smile. “Don’t ask questions you don’t want answers to,” she says, letting out a choked laugh that’s cut short when she clenches her teeth together against a groan of pain. 

The smile that’s begun to work its way onto Clint’s face in the wake of her comment abruptly falls, and his eyes dart down to her leg again. He crosses his arms, wonders how much running she’s done on that leg, wonders how much damage that’s done on top of the cut. 

“You really should go to the hospital,” he repeats, because he’s not sure what else he’s supposed to do in this situation. 

The words have barely left his mouth when he feels himself being forcefully shoved backwards and suddenly Natasha’s face is very close to his and she’s pinning him to the wall with a surprising amount of strength considering her small size and the weakness in her leg. Her eyes are fiery and sharp and she’s got a knife that she’s pulled out of somewhere pressed to his throat, and Clint has no doubt in his mind that if they were to fight right now, she would probably get the better of him even with her wound. 

“You are _not_ taking me the hospital,” Natasha hisses, more dangerous than he’s ever heard. 

“Or what? You’ll kill me?” Clint asks fairly evenly, because even though he’s pretty sure she’s got the skills to do so, he somehow doesn’t think she would. 

Clint’s comment must catch Natasha off guard, because she retreats back half an inch and her eyebrows knit together like she can’t figure him out. She blinks and then after a moment releases him, moving back to slump in the chair, exhaustion creeping up on her features again now that the anger and defensiveness has passed. 

“I don’t have the energy to clean up the mess that’d make,” she mumbles as she shoves her knife back into her boot. She pins him with piercing, serious eyes. “But I could.”

Clint lets out a breath and rubs at his neck where the blade bit into his skin as he grabs his stool from where it’s skidded off to the side so he can sit next to her again. He scrubs a hand over his face and sighs. 

“At least let me take a look at it,” he says, aware of how weary he sounds but not really caring. It’s been a strange night.

Natasha raises an eyebrow at him. “You a doctor all of a sudden?” she asks, her mouth twisting around her words in a dry smile. 

Clint sighs again. “No, but I know a thing or two about cuts,” he says, peering up to meet her eyes. 

Something in her expression shifts, and she makes a soft humming sound, turning her head away from him but otherwise not moving. Clint hopes that this gesture means yes and scoots a little closer to examine her leg. It looks worse up close, the edge of the wound jagged like she was cut with a serrated blade, and her skin is red and angry. There are crude stitches holding the gaping wound together, the knots messy like she did it herself in a hurry, and it’s thankfully not bleeding anymore but Clint worries about infection at the back of his head as he reaches for a bottle of water he keeps by his workstation. 

“Did you clean this?” he asks as he pours a little water over the wound, gently rubbing away dried blood from her skin. 

“Do you think I’m an idiot?” Natasha shoots back, but there’s no malice in her voice. The set of her mouth looks just shy of defeated, something too resilient and unforgiving in her to ever look resigned. 

Clint tries for a small smile, even though it feels uncomfortable and out of place. There’s a strange intimacy that comes with running to someone to keep you alive when there are no other options left (it’s a feeling that Clint knows well, years of thievery all amounting to too many close calls), and it settles awkwardly between the two of them. They’re two strangers with nothing but careful lines of ink and ambiguous, almost nonsensical ghost stories murmured over the whine of a tattoo gun lying between them, and Clint doesn’t know what to do now that he’s been dealt a hand like this. 

Clint uses the scissors at his workstation to cut her out of her jeans instead of trying to get her to take them off, lest he disturb the stitches and start the bleeding, which has only just stopped, all over again (he figures her jeans are ruined anyways, and she doesn’t stop him). It’s been a while since he’s had to bandage up a wound like this, but his hands remember where his mind doesn’t and binds the gauze tightly around her leg and she doesn’t say a word. When he’s finished, he offers to get her a change of clothes from the apartment he keeps above the shop, the apartment that only a handful of people know about, even though he’s certain none of his clothing would actually fit her. He offers to toss whatever clothes she might have in her bag in the dryer so she’ll have something proper to wear in the morning and she nods, unzipping her bag just enough to grab a pile of damp jeans and t-shirts, and shrugs out of the two jackets she’s wearing and handing the pile over to him. Clint can see bruises purpling on her arms where the short sleeves of her shirt don’t cover her skin and it feels like a punch in the gut. 

When Clint comes back, a pair of sweatpants and t-shirt in hand, Natasha’s found her way to the break room and is sitting cross-legged in front of the coffee table. She’s got three different knives and two disassembled handguns sitting on the table in front of her. Clint leans against the doorframe and raises his eyebrows at her, and she doesn’t react, just keeps calmly cleaning her pistols with practiced, steady hands. 

“You make a habit of going everywhere armed like you’re about to enter a warzone?” Clint says as lightly as he can manage, trying not to think about the stories she’s told him about home or the horrors she must’ve gone through to warrant this kind of protection everywhere she goes. 

Natasha doesn’t look up as she begins to slot together the parts of her handguns back together. “You know enough about me by now,” she says, her voice guarded in a way that Clint thinks means that she’s not in the habit of saying this to people. “You put together the pieces.”

Clint sighs and goes over to the coffee table and holds out his hand towards her. “I’m going to need those,” he says. When she snaps her head up and glares at him, he puts on his most endearing smile and says cheerfully, “I’ve sort of got a policy against keeping loaded firearms in the shop. Not great for safety.” He holds out the change of clothes he brought for her, “So, why don’t we trade?”

Natasha frowns at him. “I’m not going to accidentally shoot someone, if that’s what you’re implying,” she says. 

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Clint says. He doesn’t lower his hand. “And yet.”

Natasha looks at him for a long moment but sighs when she sees that he isn’t going to budge and slides the guns in his open palm. Clint tosses her the clothes in exchange, which she catches easily, and goes to lock her guns in the safe he keeps behind his desk. 

“As a gesture of my good faith,” Clint says as he ducks out of the break room to clean up the mess on the shop floor and let her change in privacy, “You can keep the knives if you promise not to stab me when I’ve got my back turned.”

When he glances over his shoulder, he notices that she doesn’t smile, but she looks like she’s at least considering it when she says, “Deal.”

Once Clint’s done mopping up the puddles in the shop, he ventures back into the break room, wondering what the protocol is for dealing with possible assassins or criminals or whatever it is that she does for a living who come crashing in in the middle of the night seeking asylum. It’s new, he admits, which is saying something considering his life’s trajectory. 

Clint finds Natasha sitting in the same position as she was before, the pieces of her ruined jeans dumped in the trash can and her soaked t-shirt hanging over the back of the couch to dry. She looks impossibly small in his clothing, the sleeves of his t-shirt falling down to her elbows and dwarfing her thin frame. Her knives are gone from the table, but Clint isn’t naïve enough to think that she’s put them away somewhere out of reach. She’s fiddling with a piece of paper in front of her and she looks up when Clint walks in, a thoughtful expression on her face. 

“I want a tattoo,” she says. 

Clint raises an eyebrow and sits down on the floor across the table from her. “I, uh, don’t think I can do that for you,” he says calmly, bracing himself internally for her to lash out at him. 

She frowns. “Why?” she asks, voice suddenly harsh around the word, accusatory like Clint’s said something to personally offend her. 

Clint smiles and waves in the general direction of her leg. “In case you’ve forgotten, you’re hurt, and I have no idea how much blood you lost,” he says. “Why don’t you have a bite to eat and a glass of water first, then we’ll talk. I prefer my clients fed and hydrated, if that’s okay with you.”

Natasha presses her lips together. “And then you’ll do it?” she asks. Clint just shrugs at this, and he watches as she clenches her teeth together, her jaw working as she thinks. She nods, “Fine.”

Clint grins. “Great,” he says as he stands again to head over to the mini-fridge in the corner to root around for something edible. “You like pizza?”

\---

Two hours later sees Natasha sitting on the couch next to Clint, her legs tucked under her as she listens to him talk about how he’d broken his wrist when he was eight trying to balance along the length of a fence (it’s a story, he thinks later, that carries more weight than he probably means to let on, but he’s mostly just talking to distract her, talking to fill the space, so he goes on anyways). His parents were still alive back then, but it’d been one of those rare, quiet afternoons when his father was passed out on the couch and it was just him and his older brother and the great expanse of their backyard to conquer. 

“I was a pretty dumb kid,” Clint says around a laugh that he tries to make lighter than the memory, remembering his brother Barney’s wide, frightened eyes and the two of them huddled together by the old wood planks of the fence, trying to set his bones back into place by themselves so they wouldn’t have to tell their father. “My bones never did quite heal the right way. They still make this cracking sound sometimes. Here, look—”

He sticks out his right arm towards her and twists his wrist, grinning when she scrunches up her nose at the soft crackling his arm makes. She shoves his hand away from her face. 

“You should probably get that checked out,” she says, stuffing the rest of her pizza crust in her mouth. Despite the lethal grace he’d felt when she pinned him against the wall earlier, there’s something shockingly normal and graceless about the way she eats, licking tomato sauce off her fingers and cramming too much food in her mouth at once like she wasn’t taught proper manners as a kid. It’s comforting, Clint supposes, as much as anything about her is comforting. 

“You’re one to talk,” he says, which pulls a playful smile out of her, mostly natural and unguarded, downright relaxed compared to how she’d been when she first showed up. He nods towards her leg, “How is it?”

Natasha shrugs and sets her plate aside, reaching for the bottle of water he’d set down in front of her earlier and insisted that she finish if she wanted him to do any work on her skin tonight. 

“Not too bad.” She shrugs. “I’ve had worse,” she says, and this, this confirmation that she’s been through this and probably more dire situations before, this is no comfort at all. Natasha offers a smile that looks rehearsed, practiced. “Better now that I’m not running on it, anyways.”

Clint hums and tries not to frown. Natasha studies his expression carefully, like she’s checking for faults or tricks, and smiles, something exciting and dangerous in the curve of her mouth. 

“Does this mean you’ll do the tattoo?” she asks.

Clint shrugs. “Maybe,” he evades. He leans back a little on the couch. “What did you have in mind?”

Natasha pauses a moment like she’s thinking before she leans over to grab the slip of paper she was toying with earlier and hands it over to him. The paper feels worn in his fingers like it’s been turned over many times, the edges fuzzy and frayed, and there’s a small smudge of red in the corner like it’s from a bloody fingerprint. There’s nothing on the paper but the corner of a musical score, five horizontal lines with notes climbing up and down in a melody that Clint can’t read. He turns it over and it’s the same thing on the other side, the corner of a score, and he raises his eyebrows at Natasha, curious and wondering what the story is here. 

“The staff,” Natasha says, bringing her knees up to her chest and looping her arms around them. “Not the notes, just the lines. I’d like them in a ring around my thigh, under the cut.”

Clint turns the paper over and over in his hand, contemplative, wondering if this is a mistake, this housing a possible fugitive, letting himself feel comfortable around her, letting himself talk to her like she’s something close to a friend to him. Natasha sits back and crosses her arms, waiting. 

“You going to do it?” she asks. 

Clint shrugs again and folds the paper into his hand. “Maybe,” he says, unable to stop his mouth from curving up into a smile at the way her expression shifts into an intriguing blend of annoyed and interested. Clint feels something jump under his skin but doesn’t flinch, instead gestures to Natasha’s water, “Finish your water.”

Natasha’s eyes track his movements as he stands, her mouth quirking into a pleased smile when she sees him moving towards the door that leads back out into the shop. Clint ducks his head, turning away before she can catch the fond smile on his face as he goes to prepare the design on transfer paper. The shop is quiet and Clint doesn’t hear Natasha move, but her bare toes creep into the edge of his vision a moment later, startling him even though he doesn’t move, even though the instinct to jump and twitch has long since been trained out of him. 

“Hey,” Natasha says, sliding up to sit in the chair. She’s taken the sweatpants he lent her off and his t-shirt falls nearly halfway down her thighs and her legs are peppered in old scars and new bruises. 

“Hi,” Clint says, finishing up putting the design on transfer paper. 

He has about half a second to register a movement out of the corner of his eye before he shoots his hand out and catches the now empty water bottle that Natasha throws at him. When he glances up, he finds Natasha peering at him with a mildly impressed expression on her face, one of her eyebrows arched up in a fascinated curve. 

“I’d like to have that tattoo now, please,” she says, mock sweet. She kicks her good leg gently back and forth, smiles like she thinks she’s won something from him.

Clint laughs. “Well, only because you asked so nicely,” he says and motions for her to sit in the chair properly, back against the backrest so he can set the stencil. 

He tugs the shirt up, closer to her hip where her leg is bent up, foot resting on the seat. Her skin is soft and warm under his hands as he sets the stencil just under the bottom edge of the bandage like she asked. He feels her eyes on him as he picks up the gun and starts in with the ink, something thoughtful and heavy that Clint can’t quite name weighing down on him. It’s not necessarily uncomfortable, but it’s a hazy feeling, as if he’s hearing something through water, faraway and echoing and rippling at the edges of his consciousness. It feels like everything about her, just out of reach but beautiful, tantalizing. 

“So,” Clint says, trying not to sound too interested. “What’s the story here, then? Why the sheet music? That’s not something people think to make into a tattoo every day.”

Natasha lets out a long breath and tips her head back in the chair, the uneven ends of her hair splaying out on the headrest like a fan. Her expression is suddenly tired and sad, nothing like the warm, playful looks she’d been shooting him earlier but, he thinks, maybe realer. 

“I had a job,” she says, her voice so soft it almost sounds breakable except that she doesn’t feel breakable beneath his fingers. She feels powerful and raw. “I had a job, and I didn’t—I don’t care, usually, what I do, only that I have my work and my freedom.” She presses her lips together and frowns. “I was hired by a large crime family to take out a key member of a rival family to topple their power structure. That’s all I knew going in. Didn’t tell me that there was going to be an innocent family caught in the crosshairs. I like my work clean. I do bad things, but I do bad things to bad people, most of the time. This was… different. There was a family of five – two parents, ten year old daughter, four year old son, and a baby. If I killed my mark, they’d go down too. No reason to it. Just at the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Clint realizes a moment too late that he’s stopped moving altogether, needle hovering a fraction of an inch over her skin. He knows she’s noticed too even though she hasn’t looked at him since she started talking, because when she opens her mouth to speak, her voice is quieter, slower, more deliberate like she doesn’t know how to properly say what she means. 

“I couldn’t do it,” she says, and something catches in her throat, not quite breaking but snagging along the ragged edge of something frayed. “I got them out, but my employer knew; a man like him likes to have insurance measures in place. A couple of his goons came after me when I was getting the family out the fire escape. The family got away, and I got out fine, but not before…” She gestures towards her leg and sighs. “The paper was something I grabbed on accident. Ripped up the girl’s music.” 

Natasha closes her eyes and lets out a bitter laugh. The sound makes something ache in Clint’s chest. 

“I guess I just,” Natasha starts, then thinks better of it, says instead, “I’ve been doing this for so long without asking questions that I forgot why it was so important to. I guess I’m not as good as I thought when I left home after all.”

And Clint doesn’t know her at all, doesn’t have any right to judge whether she’s a good or bad person, and he should probably very reasonably think that she’s not quite a decent person after all since she’s all but admitted that she kills for a living. But there’s something in her, the edge of guilt in her voice, the hopelessness of not being the person she wants to be, that makes Clint think that maybe, given time, she could be someone he trusted. 

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” Clint hears himself saying before he can stop himself. He looks up at her and smiles, hoping that he looks as reassuring as he means, “You saved a family of five. That’s not so bad.”

Natasha tips her head over to meet Clint’s eyes and there’s something achingly vulnerable about her that makes him want to bundle her up and hide her away (which is a ridiculous thought, because she’s a career killer and probably the most independent person he’s ever met and he gets the feeling that she’d die before she let anyone treat her like she’s something to be coddled and protected). She smiles, a little sad, a little like she wants to believe what Clint’s saying, a little like she can’t quite be that naïve. 

“Yeah,” she says, though she doesn’t sound entirely convinced. “Yeah, I guess.”

Clint ducks his head to get back to inking in the design on her skin. And Clint doesn’t know what else to say to get her to believe it, because he’s not a naïve person, he’s _never_ been a naïve person because he could never afford to be, but here she is confessing her sins to him and getting a tattoo of a pattern she stole from a family she saved, one line for each life, and Clint can’t think that there’s anything but good in that, never mind that she didn’t complete her job, never mind she’s been doing bad things for a long time. The fact that a person, after all of that, could still stop and draw a line somewhere, when it would be so easy to just let things slip, is enough. Sure, she’s not a saint (and criminals rarely are), but she’s not cruel either. 

“People could die because I didn’t finish the job,” Natasha says softly. 

Clint shrugs and starts another line. “People will die anyways,” he says. “If you think that just because you take out one member, the other members of that crime family won’t die, that other innocent people won’t get caught in the crossfire, I think you need to do some more research into how turf wars work.”

Natasha sighs. “I know,” she says, and the _what if_ is evident in her voice. 

“It’s not your responsibility to save anyone,” Clint says. “You’re not Captain America. That’s not your job.”

Natasha gives him an odd look like there’s something she’d say to him if only she could. “I know,” she says again, and this time it sounds like she’s trying to say _but I could’ve been_. 

Clint can’t make a beginning or an end of what she’s saying and what she’s not, so he just lets the whine of the gun drown out the silence that settles between them. Natasha’s eyes never leave Clint, watching, quiet, and her breathing is smooth and even. After a moment, he feels the muscles in her leg shift minutely, which is the only warning he gets before her fingers touch down, light, on his shoulder, tracing over the inky feathers that branch out from his spine and curl over his shoulders and down his biceps, peeking out from where he cut the sleeves off his t-shirt because he’d accidentally spilled bleach on it. 

“What’s the story here?” she asks, quiet and gentle.

The low sound of her voice and the tickle of her fingers mapping out the ends of the feathers inked into his shoulder sends a slight thrum running under the surface of Clint’s skin, and he’s glad that the instinct to fidget and twitch hasn’t been a part of his skill set in years. 

Clint shrugs and frowns a little too pointedly at the line he’s working on. 

“When I was a kid, things weren’t great,” he finds himself admitting to her a moment later, even though he hasn’t told this story to anyone in years. “My father was an asshole, and I spent a lot of time wishing I could be somewhere else. I always thought it’d be nice to be a bird, I guess. They could fly away if they didn’t like something, and I couldn’t do that. When I ran away from foster care after my parents died, I was twelve and the traveling circus seemed like my best option. Of course it wasn’t always great, and when we moved around from town to town, I’d always ride at the top of all the stuff we had, high as I could go. Still dreaming of flying, maybe. When I was sixteen or so, my, uh, my brother did this for me. I was good at climbing things, good in high places. Everyone had started calling me ‘The Hawk.’ My brother said, ‘If you want to fly, Clint, you gotta have wings.’” Clint smiles a little, feels how wistful and nostalgic it must look on his face, and doesn’t dare look up. “So I got my wings. That was the last thoughtful thing he ever gave to me.”

Natasha’s fingers still against the curve of his shoulder. “You two don’t get along anymore?” she asks. 

Clint glances up for a moment and says vaguely, “We lost touch a while back,” instead of telling the whole story because it’s too much and too long and she probably doesn’t care to hear it anyways. He tries for a lighter smile and says, “Anyways, last time I saw him, I kind of stole a lot of money from him, so there’s that.”

Natasha raises her eyebrows and that lovely smirk that makes it look like she’s toying with him, like they share some sort of inside joke, pulls at her mouth again. “Oh?” she says. “So you’re a criminal too?”

Clint laughs. “I won’t tell if you won’t,” he says, finishing up the last line in her tattoo. He gestures with a dramatic flourish at her leg, the skin red and raised around the fine black lines wrapping around her thigh. “All done.”

She grins, a wide, shining thing, and ducks her chin so he won’t see the open emotion in her eyes. “Thank you,” she says and sounds like she means it.

Clint smiles as he carefully bandages up her leg for the second time that night. Natasha’s fingers are still absently skating over his skin, warm and delicate and distracting, and if Natasha notices that he’s moving slower than usual, distracted and clumsy, at least she doesn’t say anything about it. When Clint looks up again, palms smoothing down the bandage unnecessarily, he finds something heavy but careful in her eyes, the look of someone not used to openly wanting anything. Her fingers still on his skin. Clint feels something wild and electric flare up in his chest, terrifying and unfamiliar after a long, long period of not letting himself fall into anyone’s orbit (because what good is a thief with loyalties?). It’s a dangerous feeling, even more so because Natasha is on the run and she’s hurt and vulnerable, and Clint knows it, but it runs hot through his veins anyways, burning like poison. 

“Natasha,” Clint says softly, voice hoarse and scratching at the back of his dry throat. 

Natasha leans slowly in with hooded eyes, cautious like she’s always expecting things to fall apart, and her lips brush against his for a moment, lingering just a fraction of an inch away, waiting for something, before she crashes into him, hungry and eager and wanting so badly that Clint can feel it shiver through him. And he shouldn’t do this, he knows he shouldn’t do this, because she’s beautiful and precarious and a bad idea wrapped up in red curls and green eyes and too much fight, but Clint’s never been very good at doing what’s good for him. He finds himself melting into her, giving back as much as he’s taking, warm all over, the fire in his ribcage spilling over to his gut and up his throat. He finds himself kissing her back as she presses into him like she’s trying to find solace under his skin, finds himself on the verge of forgetting altogether why this should be the last thing he wants before he catches himself and brings a hand up to her shoulder and gently pushes until she backs off. She presses her lips together, eyes unfocused and spots of color high on her cheeks. 

“We shouldn’t,” Clint says, the sound unconvincing even to his own ears because he can still hear the blood rushing through his ears at the warmth of her touch.

Natasha draws her hand back from his arm quickly like his skin is suddenly too hot to touch. She crosses her arms. 

“You want to,” she says, and it’s not a question at all. 

Clint smiles a little, wondering why he suddenly feels so hollow. “Of course,” he admits softly, because there’s no point in denying it when he’s so easy to read like this. “But I—We really shouldn’t. You’re hurt and there are people after you, and it’s just a bad idea, Nat.” 

The nickname slips out like they’ve known each other for years, like Clint has earned the right to call her anything other than what she’s told him. Her expression tightens at it, and her posture starts to close off and withdraw at the refusal in his voice. Clint wonders if he should apologize for addressing her so familiarly, wonders if she’s really taken offense to it or if this is just discomfort at something unfamiliar. 

“Hey,” Clint says gently, trying to smooth out the tense wrinkles in her forehead, hating the way her brow pinches when her guard’s up. “Hey, look. It’s just—This is a bad time, okay? You’re in a bad place and I don’t want to—”

“I’m not asking for a pity fuck,” Natasha interrupts him, words sharp at being treated like she’s made of things that break. 

Clint smiles, the defensiveness in her voice puncturing something cold under his skin. “Didn’t think you were,” he says. He looks down at his hands. “This just isn’t how I wanted—This isn’t how I like to end up sleeping with people I like. It doesn’t feel right.”

Natasha frowns at him, arms still crossed, but the rigidity in her shoulders softens just a little. Clint peels off his gloves and stands, offering her a hand to help her down from the chair. 

“You’re welcome to stay the night still,” he says, hoping to get a smile out of her. “And hey, if you ever come back some day when you don’t have a target painted on your back and decide you still want this, I’m all yours. Just not tonight.”

Natasha peers up at him like she can’t quite figure him out and quirks a smile that doesn’t fully reach her eyes. “You have an odd sense of morality, Clint,” she says, slipping her hand into his and stepping down onto the ground. 

Clint laughs. “What can I say?” he says lightly. “Guess I’m a thief with a heart of gold.”

Natasha rolls her eyes as she pads across the shop floor in bare feet to gather her things and follow Clint to the door at the very back of the shop that looks like nothing more than a supply closet but in fact leads to a narrow staircase that climbs up to Clint’s apartment. He carefully clicks both of the locks to the staircase door shut behind them and then once he leads the way into his apartment, locks and deadbolts that door as well, because old habits die hard and even though Clint doesn’t think that Natasha would be so sloppy to be followed here, it doesn’t hurt to be wary. 

Clint retrieves Natasha’s now dry clothing from his dryer and tells her to make herself comfortable as he goes to make sure there are some clean towels in the bathroom and that his bed isn’t too much of a mess. He gathers up and tosses a couple sketchbooks and a pile of old comic books onto his nightstand and shoves the worst of his dirty laundry in his closet before he decides it’s good enough and goes out to the living room where he left Natasha. She’s lingering by his bookshelf, paging through a thin, worn volume with an unusual amount of care, and her laundry is folded in a tidy pile on the couch. Her hair falls over her shoulder in an uneven line, obscuring the meditative expression on her face, and if it weren’t for the way that she’s leaning just a little on her left leg and the bandages from her wound and her new tattoo peek out from under Clint’s shirt, she would look almost normal. 

“You like Hemingway?” Clint asks, recognizing the faded red markings and yellowed cover of his copy of _In Our Time_. 

Natasha lifts her head and smiles, something sly slipping between her lips. “He’s sparse,” she says instead of answering properly. She raises an eyebrow at him and gently tips the book shut. “How did you manage to get your hands on a first edition?”

Clint shrugs and flops down on the couch. “Souvenir?” he offers. When she pins him with a sharp, questioning look, he relents and laughs. “After I left the circus, I sort of made a name for myself as a… criminal for hire, I guess you could say. I did all sorts of things, but by and large, my work ended up revolving around disabling security measures to redistribute rare and expensive items for people with a lot of money. Y’know, taking out guards, disabling alarms, locating security cameras, that sort of thing. My first job was helping to steal a lovely Cézanne from a private collection in Paris. It went smoothly, and to celebrate my easy victory, I treated myself with a little something extra. It was just collecting dust on a shelf and all the attention would be on the painting, anyways. No one even noticed.”

Natasha’s mouth curves up as he talks, eyes bright. Clint thinks absently that this is the most impressed that Natasha has ever looked with him. Clint shifts. 

“There are clean towels in the bathroom, by the way, and I just washed my sheets a few days ago, so the bed should be fine, but there are extra sheets in the closet if you want them,” Clint tells her, only vaguely surprised that it doesn’t feel odd to be discussing something as mundane as this after talking about his unusual past (though he supposes this must all be fairly normal to Natasha, considering everything she’s been through). Natasha’s eyebrows pinch together and she looks like she’s about to protest when Clint just waves his hand, “You’re hurt and probably a lot more tired than I am. Just let me be a good host, okay?”

Natasha hesitates half a moment, almost like she wants to push back just for the sake of it, before she relents and nods. She sets the book down on the coffee table in front of the couch and gathers up her neatly folded clothing and her bag and slips off to the bedroom, only limping faintly and shutting the door behind her with a soft click. 

Clint lets out a breath in a whoosh once she’s gone and flops back on the couch, feeling like he can really breathe for the first time all night. As much as he’d wanted to see Natasha again (which, now that he thinks about it, has probably been more than he’d been willing to admit to himself), this is the last way he’d expected to do it. And there’s something about her now that he didn’t expect from her, something fragile and fiery all at once, something surprisingly vulnerable and guarded, like she’s constantly walking on glass. It makes something seize in Clint’s chest in a way that he’s not entirely sure if he’s ever felt before or even equipped to deal with. It’s this instinct to hold and protect that he’s only ever felt about Kate, except that Natasha would never let him treat her like something precious. 

It’s all a huge mess, he thinks to himself as he goes to the hall closet to grab a spare blanket and a pillow. It’s all a huge mess with the two of them and Clint isn’t sure what you’re supposed to do when confronted with beautiful assassins who show up bleeding on your doorstep but it hardly matters because he’s pretty sure he’d fuck it up anyways because he’s never been very good at properly Handling Situations. The strange thing is that Natasha doesn’t seem to care, because there’s something perceptive about her like she can read him without even trying and she’s decided to that she’d seen enough in him to show up and stay anyways. And Clint doesn’t even know what that means and falls asleep wondering why Natasha, who by all accounts is responsible and meticulous and probably too cautious, has decided to place her trust in him. 

\---

Clint wakes suddenly with the taste of sleep in his mouth an indeterminable number of hours later to the sound of screams. They’re not ordinary screams either. No, they’re the screams of someone in excruciating pain or real, bone-chilling terror or someone who genuinely believes that they’re about to die. Clint is very familiar with this kind of scream.

He’s off the couch and across the room in an instant, heart thudding in his ears as he throws the bedroom door open and cries out, “Natasha?”

Natasha startles at the noise and whips her head around towards him, hair a mess and eyes wild. The sheets are bunched all around her like she’s been tossing and turning and her posture is defensive, her body arching to cave in on itself. She looks like she’s just stared death in the face, and a faint sheen of sweat shines on her forehead, stray strands of hair sticking to her damp skin. She’s breathing hard but looks otherwise unharmed, so Clint lets out a breath in relief, letting his shoulders sag and leaning against the doorframe, just toeing the edge of the bedroom’s threshold. 

“Bad dream?” Clint asks, his voice coming out low and gravely from sleep. 

Natasha stares at him with wide eyes and doesn’t respond, pressing her lips together like she’s trying to stop her fear from spilling out. Clint imagines that it’s a look that’s graced his own face countless times and scrambles to remember what it was that finally wiped the terror from his body all those years ago in the dead of night. 

Clint nods towards the bed. “May I?” he asks.

Natasha hesitates, gaze trained sharply on him like she’s expecting this to be a trap, but she slides over a few inches and looks away, arms coming up to wrap protectively around her knees. Clint approaches the bed cautiously, noting as he sits down facing her that her hands are trembling ever so slightly, that she’s pressing them tightly into her skin to try to get them to stop. Clint crosses his legs under him and tries not to sigh, tries to figure out what he’s supposed to do now, tries to figure out how one is supposed to comfort a woman who’s seen the worst the world has to offer. 

“D’you want to see a trick?” Clint asks, the words tumbling out of his mouth even though he’s pretty sure he meant to say something else. 

Natasha jerks her head around, frowning. “What?” she says, and Clint notices that her voice wobbles just perceptibly around the word. 

Clint smiles in a way that he hopes is warm and comforting and leans back on his hands. “When I was a kid,” he says, deciding to just go along with his blunder instead of trying to fight his way out, “I used to get nightmares a lot. Byproduct of growing up in a household that was more destructive than nurturing, I suppose. Sometimes I’d wake up in the middle of the night and be too scared to go back to sleep. My brother was always good at comforting me—or distracting me, really. He knew how to do this trick – I don’t know where he learned it from, but he could flick a coin from his fingers and shatter glass. I wasn’t very good at it, but when I couldn’t sleep, we would sneak out and collect all the empty bottles my dad left lying around the house and go out into the street and he’d try to teach me. We’d do that for hours, and by the time I went back in to sleep, I wouldn’t be thinking about the nightmares anymore.”

Natasha’s peering at him thoughtfully like she’s never really seen him before, chin resting on her knees. She looks small and fragile in tangle of sheets and Clint’s shirt, and her wide eyes catch the dim light of the room, making her look young and vulnerable. It hurts, somehow, to see her like this, like this is something forbidden, like this is something no one was ever supposed to see. 

“You talk about him a lot,” she says softly, “Your brother.”

Clint shrugs. “Yeah, well,” he says, ducking his chin down and turning his head away so she won’t see how it grates on his already frayed nerves to think about Barney. “He was the only good part of my childhood, I guess, so there’s that.”

Natasha’s quiet for a long moment, doesn’t push, doesn’t ask him anything else, and when Clint looks back over at her, he catches an achingly open expression on her face that makes him want to do something irrational and stupid and more than likely to get him punched in the face, like kiss her, like ask her to stay with him forever. And then she looks down and the moment is lost, but Clint still feels something ghosting over his skin like an afterimage. 

“Do you still have nightmares?” she asks, not meeting his eyes, as if something momentous hangs in the balance, all dependent on his answer. 

“Sometimes,” Clint admits, because there are always things you never quite escape, no matter how far you run. “Less now than I was a kid, but yeah, every now and again.”

Natasha frowns, something settling in the curve of her mouth like she’s trying to find the words for something she’s never articulated before. There’s a heaviness in her posture when she finally opens her mouth to speak a long moment later, and even though she doesn’t look at Clint, he feels the chill of what she says all the way down to his bones.

“I lost my parents when I was very young,” Natasha tells him, voice hushed like it’s a secret. “I don’t even remember them anymore. When you think of home, you’re supposed to remember your family and their faces, but all I can think of is the cold of winter and the feel of a blade in my hand.” She pauses, unsure, but furrows her brow and pushes on, “I was part of… a program that took orphaned girls that taught them that the best way to survive was killing someone before they killed you. I learned the sound a man makes when he dies before I learned what a man sounds like in bed.” There’s a beat, like she’s thinking, and then she adds with a humorless smile, “Though, not by much, I guess.”

The weight in her words, the searing pain of it that he can just pick out under the layers and layers of distance and careful practice, rattles Clint to his core, making him feel like he’s just been punched in the gut. Of course he’d assumed that she’d been young starting out; people like them always are, because the earlier you unlearn instincts the harder your training will stick. But there’s something in the saying of it that makes it all sink in for the first time, and Clint is left winded in the wake of it, unsure of how to process all this new information.

“We were all like little adults by the time we were fifteen,” Natasha continues, “Immersed in a world where we celebrated first kills instead of birthdays or first kisses. It was the only life I knew, and before I knew it, I had more blood on my hands than soldiers twice my age.” Natasha pauses and twists her mouth into something bitter and says, voice harsher now, “I thought that was all there was, and I think if it was, I might have been okay with that. But one day I woke up with everything that I was boxed up and shoved in a corner and someone else’s thoughts and someone else’s life crammed into my head. They did that to me, the people who trained me, the people who raised me. I didn’t—I still don’t quite know how they did it. I think I remember falling asleep, or maybe I was going in for a medical exam. I had headaches for months afterwards, trying to get them out of my head. I ran away after that. I just… couldn’t tell lies if I couldn’t tell whose lies I was telling. I couldn’t do it if I couldn’t tell that it was only me in my head.”

Natasha hasn’t met his eyes the entire time she’s been talking, but it hardly matters. Clint feels gutted anyways and tries not to let it show, tries to keep his expression level and supportive and warm because when your whole world is falling apart, the last thing you need is the people around you crumbling with the weight of it. 

“That when you came here?” he asks, pleased with how calm he sounds, even though he feels a little more like punching a hole in the wall or wrapping Natasha up in his arms and crying into her hair. 

She shifts to meet his eyes now, expression more sad and lost than he’s ever seen on her. “That was a couple years later,” she says, and for some reason, Clint feels like she’s trying to tell him something without saying anything. 

“Why’d they let you go?” he asks, more for the sake of filling the space than anything else, because he’s worried that if he lets the moment linger for too long, she’ll start to spiral away from him.

Natasha shrugs and looks away again. “I knew too much,” she says quietly. “And I made it abundantly clear that I could rip their empire down if they didn’t leave me alone. So they did.”

Clint frowns. “That’s a hard way to live,” he says.

Natasha smiles at her feet. “At least it’s living,” she murmurs. Her eyes flick up to peer into his, as if seeking some sort of affirmation that she’s doing the right thing. “That’s more than I can say for what I was doing before.”

Clint furrows his eyebrows together, trying and failing not to look like he cares too much about her, even though he hardly knows her, even though he’s not even sure if they’re what he can call friends. He knocks his foot against her ankle instead and tries to stop his voice from shaking when he speaks.

“Scoot over.”

She’s less hesitant now than when he’d asked her to move earlier and she lets him slide under the blankets next to her and tug the heavy comforter up over the two of them. He doesn’t make any attempt to curl himself around her, even though he desperately wants to, and her careful eyes watch him even in the dark, her hair fanning out around her like a halo. He meets her eyes, steady and unwavering and sure, trying to be for her what she needs, until her gaze softens and her eyes slip shut. It takes a handful of minutes for her breathing to even out, but when she does, her expression evens out to something less tense and guarded, something without the tired lines under her eyes and creasing her forehead, and she looks so utterly normal that Clint almost lets himself imagine, just for a moment, that he could someday have even the slightest chance of having this every night. 

\---

Clint wakes up at some odd, early hour of the morning with the faintest strains of dawn light leaking in through his drawn blinds, and later, Clint will look at this moment and wonder if it was all just a dream after all. He wakes, but only something like halfway, mind still foggy from sleep, and finds himself tangled up in Natasha, her head nestled in the crook of his neck, soft breaths tickling his neck, and an arm thrown loosely over his chest, legs looped around his in a comfortable pile. It’s cozy and easy and painfully domestic in a way that Clint’s never been allowed to have in his whole life, and he curls into it without thinking about it, pressing his face into the mess of her red hair and smelling something bitter, like gunshot residue. 

The incongruence of the scent with the quiet intimacy of the moment should probably jerk him awake, startle him because private moments like this aren’t meant to be filled with reminders from the battlefield, but Clint has never lived his life far from the fight, so he just settles into it as if this is what they do, as if this is how they always are, wondering (wishing) if it could always be this easy.

\---

Clint wakes for real several hours later, when the sun is streaming insistently through the cracks in the blinds. He blinks blearily at the light, trying to will himself to consciousness and remembering absently that he forgot to set an alarm to get up in time to open shop, and realizes with a sudden jolt that the bed next to him is vacant. He sits up suddenly and looks around, confused and disoriented and half-fearful that something may have happened to Natasha. The room is empty. 

He ventures out into his apartment, pulling on a pair of sweatpants, and finds the rest of his place equally empty as the bedroom. The bathroom floor is slightly damp and there’s still a bit of moisture clinging to the air from when Natasha must’ve showered, but otherwise, there’s no sign that she was even here. Her duffle bag and her neatly folded clothing are all gone, and Clint would almost think that he made the whole thing up in his head, delirious from sleep deprivation or something, except that when he thinks to check (though he has no idea what motivated him to do so), he finds that his copy of Hemingway’s _In Our Time_ is gone. In its place on the coffee table where Natasha had left it the night before is a neat stack of bills and the slip of sheet music that Natasha had clutched in her hand when she’d come in. Clint frowns and picks up the money and the paper quizzically, wondering if this means she’s left for good, in the wind where no one will ever find her. 

Clint shoves the money in his pocket as he heads down to the shop, wondering in the back of his head what time it is, and inspects the paper. On it, Natasha has scrawled something in red pen in looping, slanted writing: _From one thief to another –N_. Clint’s still staring at the paper when he walks into the shop, unsure if Natasha is still here somewhere, if she’s ever going to be more than a mysterious force drifting in and out of his life. 

A wad of paper hits Clint squarely on the nose almost as soon as he steps into the shop and he jerks his head up to find Kate glaring at him, arms crossed in frustration.

“Where the hell have you been?” she demands. “You were supposed to open shop like _two hours_ ago.” 

Clint blinks. “I, uh, was busy? Last night I mean. I, um, didn’t sleep till late, and, uh,” he rubs at the back of his neck and offers a sheepish, apologetic smile. “Sorry?”

Kate rolls her eyes and waves him off, just a touch too fond to be as exasperated as she’s trying to seem. “Whatever,” she says. “You’re lucky I know how to run this place better than you do.”

“Hey!” Clint says indignantly, which wins him a sly grin from Kate. 

She nods at the paper in his hands. “What’s that?” she asks. 

Clint looks down at the slip of paper, suddenly too aware of the fact that there are smudges of Natasha’s blood along the edges of it. 

“Nothing,” he says too quickly. 

Kate raises her eyebrows at him and walks over to snatch it out of his hand before he can react and she frowns at the back. 

“What is this, some sort of code?” she asks, and then turns it over to look at the front, her expression turning knowing when she sees it. “‘N’? That wouldn’t be Natasha, would it? What happened? Did she come here last night?” And then Kate’s eyes grow wide, and she hisses, “ _Did you sleep with her?_ ”

Clint grabs the paper back from her and gives her a look that says _please, have we met?_. “She was in a bit of trouble,” he says evasively. “I helped her out. And no, I didn’t sleep with her. I might be an asshole, but I’m not that much of an asshole.” 

Kate laughs and bumps her shoulder against his as she walks past him to the break room. “You’re not as much of an asshole as you might think, Clint,” she says, going to pour herself a cup of coffee. 

Clint snorts. “Thanks,” he says, half-distracted already and more interested in the back of the paper, which he didn’t even think to look at until Kate pointed it out. Sure enough, written on the paper in the same red ink as the front is a series of numbers. 

_5008559841441299790629091451_

By all accounts, it looks like just a random jumble of numbers, but Clint has the feeling that Natasha’s trying to tell him something. Kate peeks over his shoulder as he’s trying to figure it out, still not quite awake enough to fully process what Natasha wrote, and slides a warm, fresh cup of coffee in his free hand, far too familiar with the fact that he needs more caffeine than any sane person should to get through the day. 

“ _Is_ it a code? Because that was mostly a joke, you know,” Kate says. 

Clint takes a large gulp of his coffee, too sweet and just the way he likes it, and squints at the paper, feeling like this isn’t so much a code so much as Natasha just trying to be a little discreet. He’s pretty sure that if Natasha wanted to send him a message in code, it’d be much more convoluted than this. He feels like the answer is staring at him in the face, like it should be so obvious, because Clint has lived his whole life in the business of avoiding prying eyes; a vaguely cryptic message like this should be no problem. 

Suddenly, most of the way through his coffee, it dawns on him. 

“I need a pen,” Clint says hastily, already patting down the pockets to his sweatpants in search of one and then rushing off to his desk in the break room to grab one of the many ballpoint pens scattered over the surface. 

He all but tosses his mug onto the desk, the dregs of his coffee splashing against the ceramic surface, and he bends over to count his way through the numbers, marking the paper in precise points. Kate drifts back into the break room after him, watching him with mild curiosity and peering down at the paper when he lifts the pen away to read the meaning of it all. 

_50.0855984, 14.4129979, 06/29/09, 14:51_

A location, a date, a time. Clint smiles. 

“What does it mean?” Kate asks. 

Clint laughs and cups his hands around her face so he can press a kiss to her forehead, unable to contain the giddiness suddenly bursting through his chest. 

“It means, Katie, that I’m going on vacation this summer,” he beams, taking the paper and stuffing it in his pocket. He calls over his shoulder as he heads back out to the shop, “You’d be okay running the shop on your own for a few days, right?” 

“What?” Kate shouts. “Are you serious?”

Clint grins. “I’ll send you a postcard,” he promises.

“So, what?” Kate says, hands on her hips and mouth pulled into a teasing smirk. “You’re just going to run across the globe because some pretty girl left you a note?”

Clint shrugs and says cheekily, “She’s interesting.”

\---

Clint hasn’t been to Prague in years. Not much has changed, though, all things considered. It’s still sunny and breezy in the summer, and there are still tourists sitting at café terraces all around the Old Town Square and along the river at all hours of the day, sipping coffee and people watching and taking pictures of everything. It’s still as beautiful as Clint remembers, with gothic style churches and pastel colored buildings with neat windows and ornate trims, and he’s fairly sure that even though he’s been in countless cities in several countries since his last visit to the Czech Republic, Prague is still one of his favorite places to vacation in the whole world. 

On the twenty-ninth of June, at two o’clock in the afternoon, Clint strolls over to the café that’s at the address that corresponds to the coordinates that Natasha left him. He slides into an empty table in the corner by the river, facing his back towards the wall of the building so he won’t miss her when she shows (he’s had a hard time trying to think ‘when’ instead of ‘if’ lately, because the cautious part of him, the part that learned from a young age not to count on anyone, keeps telling him that it’s been months since he last saw Natasha and he has no way of telling if this is some sort of trick or not). He orders coffee and a beer, beer because he wants the taste in his mouth and coffee because he only just arrived in town in the morning and he’s all sorts of exhausted and jetlagged. The sun feels good on his skin, though, and the quiet babble of people around him is soothing and helps calm the bubble of nerves that’s settled in his stomach. 

A little less than an hour later, a shadow falls across Clint’s table as he watches boats full of tourists drift past him on the river, and when Clint peeks up over the top of his sunglasses, he finds Natasha smiling down at him. She’s wearing a light, floral sundress and a wide-brimmed hat instead of the boots and leather jacket she always turns up in his shop wearing, and her hair is much darker now than it was when he last saw her, more of a dark auburn than the bright red he remembers, but she’s got that same crooked smile on her face, playful like she’s teasing him, like she only means it halfway as mean as she tries to be. 

“Is this seat taken?” she asks. 

Clint chuckles and leans back in his chair, waving her towards the empty seat. She slides down gracefully and turns her head to look out at the river next to them, thoughtful and quiet. The wind picks up stray curls of her hair and tosses them out behind her, making her look somehow delicate and fragile, for all that Clint knows she’s trained to be a killer. 

“You look good,” he offers, unable to stop the words from tumbling out of his mouth, because it’s been months and it feels like a lifetime and she’s beautiful. 

Natasha tilts her head to look at him again and flicks her hair over her shoulder. “You look like shit,” she says cheerfully.

Clint snorts. “Yeah, well, thanks to _someone_ , I just got off a nine hour flight and I’m jetlagged as all hell,” he says.

She laughs in response but doesn’t apologize. “Promiňte,” she calls out to a passing waitress, and orders a coffee for herself in perfectly accented Czech. 

Clint raises his eyebrows at her. “Of course you know how to speak Czech,” he says once the waitress walks off to get Natasha her coffee.

She smiles. “It’s my job to know things.”

Clint fiddles with the handle of his coffee cup, falling quiet as the waitress comes back and sets down a ceramic cup down in front of Natasha. 

“Děkuji,” Natasha says politely, all soft eyes and quiet syllables, and so much the picture of a nonthreatening presence that it throws Clint off guard, unsure of what to make of the drastic difference between the docile front Natasha’s putting on and the woman who came storming into his shop almost a year ago ready to tear down anyone in her way. 

“So,” he says when the waitress walks away, unsure of where to go from here, because there’s no playbook for things like this, for what to do when you meet up with a beautiful assassin in the summer in Prague for no better reason than because she asked you to. “What have you been up to lately? Still an international gun for hire?”

Natasha laughs softly and smiles at him over the rim of her cup as she takes a sip of her coffee. “Oh, come now, Clint,” she says lightly. “Didn’t anyone ever tell you that you shouldn’t ask a girl personal questions like that without at least treating her to dinner first?”

Clint huffs out a tired laugh and rubs at his eyes. In the sun, he can see clusters of light freckles scattered across Natasha’s pale shoulders and wonders when the last time she went somewhere warm was. He hauls himself to his feet with a tired groan and tosses down a handful of bills on the table before holding his hand out to Natasha.

“Well, then,” Clint says. “Shall we see the sights?”

Natasha laughs, bright and airy, and takes one last sip of her coffee before slipping her hand into Clint’s and letting him help her up. The tips of her fingers linger in his palm for a long moment before her hand lifts and resettles at the crook of his elbow as they wander away from the café. The press of her body against his side is warm and solid, and they end up weaving their way through small side streets and ducking in and out of little souvenir shops. They climb the astronomical clock tower and end up having an early dinner in one of the cafés in the Old Town Square, drinking wine and watching as a large crowd gathers around a street performer cracking a whip and juggling knives. 

It’s still light out when they wander back to Clint’s hotel, and Clint leans probably a little too much into her side, but he’s tired and he’s had a couple glasses of wine and Natasha touches a light hand to the small of his back to help him down the hall to his room, causing a warm feeling to settle in his stomach. She opens the door to his room with the keycard she must’ve lifted from his pocket at some point, and Clint frowns at her as he follows her into the room. 

“Hey,” he says, kicking the door shut. “When did you…?”

Natasha tosses the card down on a table along with her sunhat and raises an eyebrow at him, her expression playful. “What, are you telling me a career criminal like you didn’t notice someone picking his pocket?” she asks, laughter creeping in on the edges of her voice. “You really must be tired.”

Clint squints his eyes in what he hopes is a glare but probably doesn’t have enough heat behind it, because she’s smiling at him now like he’s the most precious thing she’s ever seen in her life, and it makes something unfamiliar and giddy swell up in Clint’s chest. 

“Come here,” Natasha says, nodding for him to come closer. There’s something heavy and meaningful in her gaze that Clint thinks probably should scare him, if he had the time and energy to really think about it. 

“Why?” Clint says, even as he walks over to her, feeling too warm under the weight of her gaze. 

Natasha laughs and eases him down onto the huge, king-sized bed he’d thought he’d treat himself to when he booked the room, and something sly and mischievous toys at her mouth, making Clint’s pulse leap erratically under his skin, as she says, “Didn’t want you to fall over when I did this” and kisses him.

And Clint, well, he’s kissed lots of people before and even Natasha once, that one night over her bleeding leg and a freshly finished tattoo, but god, _god_ , it’s never been anything like this. Natasha kisses like she’s trying to crawl under his skin, like she wants to find the most secret, private part of him and make a home for herself there, hands hot on Clint’s skin, tongue darting out to swipe across his open mouth. Natasha’s not hesitant and terrified and trying to find solid ground in his touch anymore, not like last time, and it’s so much _better_ , because Natasha’s just Natasha now, no agenda, no ulterior motives, just eager and beautiful and wanting him for him. Clint gasps into her mouth, hands coming up to cup the curve of her jaw and run through her hair and slide down the length of her back, feeling to firm muscle and raw power in her, groaning against her lips because he can finally have this, because all these months of trying to catch each other at the right moment have finally boiled down to just this, her mouth on his, his hands under her dress, her body pressed flush against his, simple, uncomplicated, for all that they live intricate lives. When Clint pulls away to catch his breath, Natasha is smiling at him like he’s the only thing in the entire universe that matters, and Clint feels like his chest could explode. 

“ _Fuck_ ,” he breathes out, every inch of his skin tingling and itching to be touched. 

Natasha’s mouth curves up into a smirk that Clint wants to kiss off of her. “You did promise last time that I could have you if I wanted,” she says, as if he could ever forget.

“Did I?” Clint says, unable to mask how breathless he sounds. “Well, I guess I should probably make good on that promise, then, huh?”

Natasha laughs and she leans in so that her mouth brushes against his when she speaks, “You better.”

And then she’s shoving him down on the bed and yanking him out of his clothing before she sits up to lift her dress up over her head, and Clint lets out a long breath, letting his hands wander over her exposed skin, gentle over the ridges and bumps of scar tissue from old battle wounds, yet somehow still so soft despite the years of marks. 

She’s beautiful, and Clint hardly knows what to do with himself. Natasha laughs as he flips them over, and her hair splays out around her like a fan, and she gasps when Clint kisses his way down her neck. 

She’s beautiful, and Clint wants to remember every detail of this, the way her cheeks flush red when he presses into her, the heat of her body wrapped all around his, the cries that break out of her mouth around his name when she comes apart entirely beneath him. Clint finds himself wishing, irrationally, stupidly, that he could have this forever, that Natasha could be anything close to his whenever he wanted, that she’s anything more than a shadow drifting in and out of his life. Her eyes are open and earnest and vulnerable as they stare up at him, and it reminds him of the night they told each other about their ghosts, and he thinks, for a fraction of a second as her breath stutters in a sharp staccato, that maybe that wish isn’t so far-fetched after all.

\---

“Why did you tell me to come meet you here?” Clint asks later when they’re lying together on the bed in a tangle of limbs, the comforter kicked off to the side and the windows thrown open to let in a light, warm breeze and the chatter of tourists below. “Why Prague?”

Natasha shrugs, and Clint feels her skin ripple under his hand as he runs his palm over the star map he inked on her back months and months ago. 

“I like Prague,” she says. And then after a beat, she adds, “I haven’t done anything awful here yet.”

Clint laughs softly, even though it should probably be horrifying that this is the way Natasha keeps track of where she’s been in the world. 

“Anyways,” Natasha says, smiling. “I deserve a little vacation every once in a while.”

A few strands of hair fall in her eyes and she flicks them away lazily. 

“So you’re still working, then?” Clint asks softly, wondering why he feels so heavily invested in her answer. “Still the world’s most beautiful contract killer?”

Natasha rolls her eyes at him and shoves at his chest, looking a little like she’s trying not to laugh, eyes bright and mouth twisting around a smile that she’s trying to press down. 

“I’m still working,” she says. She pauses and says slowly, like she’s not quite sure how to make sense of what she’s saying, “Just… doing something new.”

Clint raises his eyebrows at her, and now she smiles, something secret and quiet like she’s not supposed to tell anyone any of this. 

“After I left New York, months ago, I sort of called in the last favors I had to get the guys after me off my back,” she says. She looks down at her hands and her eyes look almost sheepish, like she’s afraid to admit that she needed help. “I probably could’ve done it on my own if I really wanted to, but I guess I’ve gotten tired of it all – being the bad guy, always on the run.” She pauses and folds her arms, resting her cheek down and smiling at Clint, “A couple years back, when I was just starting to make a reputation for myself, an intelligence agency contacted me. They were interested in my skill set and what I knew about… about home, and they were willing to offer me immunity in exchange for my cooperation. I, uh, wasn’t interested at the time; I think I liked being my own person too much to want to answer to anyone. It was a limited time offer, and I let it expire. I thought the higher ups might not like having me back after all this time – there were a lot of people who didn’t trust me the first time around – but it turns out that the agent I’d been in contact with years ago is now the director of the entire agency.” Here, Natasha smirks like she’s won some sort of elaborate game. “And he likes me. So I guess you could say I’ve gone straight.”

Clint thinks that he should’ve learned by now that Natasha is never going to stop surprising him, because she’s unpredictable and operates solely on her own terms and it’s probably what makes her so good at her job that an intelligence agency that considers her a threat would even consider bringing her in as an asset, but he’s surprised anyways, laughing in disbelief. 

“So you’re what now, some sort of secret agent?” he says, which makes Natasha laugh too, a quiet thing that hitches in the back of her throat, and it’s probably the most adorable thing Clint has ever heard in his life and he never wants to forget it. 

“Ever heard of SHIELD?” she asks, an eyebrow twitching up with the question. 

Clint’s eyes widen, because of course he’s heard of SHIELD, because it’s exactly the sort of shadowy covert ops organization that people in his line of work hear whispers of all the time (not that SHIELD has ever had a reason to pay much attention to art thieves and jewel heists and bank robberies and the like, except for every once in a while when someone gets too big, too ambitious, and they disappear without a trace, and every time the whispers are the same: SHIELD got to them).

“How the hell do you just have _the director_ of the _biggest_ intelligence agency in the world on speed dial?” he says, which okay, that might be an exaggeration, but Natasha’s making it sound like it was _that easy_ and when it comes to her, Clint is starting to believe that it couldn’t have been anything but. 

Natasha laughs and rolls over onto her back, lifting her arms above her head and stretching, the line of her back arching gracefully. The late evening light is spilling in through the open windows, painting a halo of golden light around her bare skin, and Clint thinks that if he were more inclined to actually painting rather than stealing other people’s art, this image would be the first thing he’d want to capture. 

“Ever consider working for them?” she asks, her voice a little more careful now, as if she’s afraid of stepping on unspoken landmines. 

Clint snorts. “I’m hardly a spy,” he says. “What would SHIELD want with me?”

Natasha grins, and something thoughtful and almost apologetic overcomes her face, and it feels so out of place on the strong lines of her face that Clint almost wants to look away. 

“I’m afraid I haven’t been completely honest with you,” she says slowly, like she’s measuring out each word before she says it. “I _am_ here on work. A little bit. I’ve been told to recruit you.” And she must notice the baffled look on Clint’s face, because she laughs softly and continues, “That job you did, what was it, six, seven years ago? You did some very fine work helping that van Gogh disappear in Cairo.”

Clint remembers the job – him and two other thieves, and Clint was in charge of taking out security cameras and guards and making sure they got in and out unseen with trick arrows that spat out just enough electricity to knock someone out. He remembers how his teammates scoffed at the notion of arrows (why not just use a gun, they’d brought up on several occasions), but it’s cleaner, Clint thinks, with arrows if you know how to use them, less blood on his hands, and he’s never been one for needless killing anyways. A precise shot to the back of the neck and a jolt of electricity is all he needs. He’s never liked bullets. 

“SHIELD’s kept an eye on you ever since,” Natasha continues. “They left you alone for a while, let you take your vacation, even kept some interested parties off your tail, but it’s been several years now. Don’t you want to get back in the game?”

Clint fights the urge to laugh, because it’s absolutely ridiculous, the idea of him running around as if he could save the world. “I’m a guy whose weapon of choice is a stick and a string,” he says incredulously. “I’m no spy.”

Natasha smiles, soft like she means to be encouraging. “No, but you’re a damn good shot,” she says, and then her smile broadens into something brighter. “I’m putting together a new strike team. I could use a sniper that I trust.”

“Are you serious?” Clint says, rolling the word _sniper_ around in his head and trying to see if it fits, because he’s never called himself that but when he thinks about it, that’s probably the best word to describe how he operates. 

Natasha rolls onto her side and props herself up on her elbows, leaning down to let her hair fall in a curtain around Clint’s face. “Clint Barton,” she says quietly, mock serious, and it sends a thrill down his spine. “I would never joke about something like this.”

And Clint means to be surprised, means to ask how the fuck she knows what his full name is because he sure as hell hasn’t ever told her, but instead he just laughs. He laughs, because of course she knows, because she’s said that it’s her job to know everything and Clint thinks she probably takes that responsibility seriously, and he leans up to catch her lips with his and murmurs _yes_ into her mouth, just _yes_ and _yes_ and _yes_ , because he thinks with a sudden start that he would do anything for her if she just asked, that he would run to the end of the entire universe and back, kicking and fighting alongside her the whole way. 

So he says yes and three days later finds himself on a plane headed to Washington DC, Natasha’s head resting on his shoulder and her arm pressed up against his, warm and solid and as comforting as Clint has ever known.

\---

When they land in DC, Clint calls the shop back in New York as they wait with their suitcases to come out at the baggage claim. Natasha is speaking rapidly into her phone, like she’s giving orders or relaying some sort of mission report, and Clint feels something excited bubble up in his chest. 

“Hello?” Kate’s familiar voice comes through the phone, and it’s only been a handful of days, but it feels like forever since Clint last heard her voice.

“Hey, Katie, it’s me,” Clint says and rubs at the back of his neck, almost afraid of what her reaction might be when he tells her the news. “Listen, my vacation looks like it’s going to be longer than anticipated. And maybe a little, um, permanent. I, uh, don’t exactly know when I’ll be back in New York.”

There’s a long silence at the other end of the line, and for a moment, Clint wonders if the call dropped, but then Kate laughs, lilting like she’s teasing him, like always. 

“I knew she’d talk you into something,” she says, and Clint can almost imagine the look on her face, one eyebrow arched, mouth pulled up into a smirk. “You’re a sucker for pretty girls.”

“Hey!” Clint says, indignant for the sake of it. “I’ll have you know I just got a new job. Like a real one. A grown up one. Top secret too. Very cool.”

Kate snorts. “Right,” she says. And then after a beat, “Does this mean you’ll agree to sign over the lease for the shop to me?”

Clint’s purple and black duffle bag makes a soft _thunk_ as it slides out onto the baggage claim, and Natasha touches a light hand to his arm before going to retrieve it and set it down next to her compact suitcase. Clint smiles. 

“Look, I gotta go,” he evades for no other reason than to bother her, “We’ll talk later, okay?”

“I’m emailing you the paperwork as we speak, you asshole,” Kate says, and Clint imagines that she’s probably rolling her eyes at him. 

“Love you too,” Clint says, sing-song, and then hangs up, hoisting his duffle bag over his shoulder and following Natasha out to the parking garage. 

Natasha turns to smirk at him as they approach a beautiful, sleek black car and dump their bags in the trunk. 

“You ready for boot camp?” she says as she slides into the driver’s side, and the way she says it makes it sound like she’s probably going to spend the greater part of his training laughing at him. “Agent Hill supervises the whole thing and she’s ruthless with new recruits.”

Clint shakes his head, trying not to grin. “Did you just recruit me to laugh at my misery?” he asks, only pretending to be serious about it. 

Natasha shrugs. “Mostly,” she says, and the way she smiles lights up her whole face from the inside, like a lantern, warm and genuine and maybe a little more earnest than she means to let on. 

And Clint can’t do anything but laugh, because even though he’s always known that he was going to go back to it all, this is the last way he’d expected to get back into the habit of running all over the globe with his bow in his hands and a quiver of arrows on his back, but as she drives the two of them away from the airport and towards the city in the distance, her eyelashes drop long shadows over the curve of her cheeks, and Clint thinks that he would die on a battlefield for her if it meant that he’d be able to see her like this again, quiet and gentle and open, and he thinks that maybe that’ll happen someday, and he can’t bring himself to regret a single thing.

**Author's Note:**

> for reference, in case anyone was curious, the "map home" tattoo that Natasha gets looks like [this](http://fuckyeahmathandsciencetattoos.tumblr.com/post/43997292998/c-palinoptika-studios-2013-this-is-a-map-home), and her solar eclipse tattoo is kind of like [this](http://m-i-s-o.tumblr.com/post/56915729822/miso-home-made-tattoos-solar-eclipse-for-noah), but on her shoulder, obvs. the music staff tattoo is like [this](http://bulk.destructoid.com/ul/user/1/16784-131429-wristjpg-620x.jpg) but around her thigh, winter in Russian is "зима" (pronounced "zima" according to google translate), and the Latin phrase is from Iron Man 2!
> 
> comments are, as always, very, very much appreciated!
> 
> also come find me on [tumblr](http://nataliaromonoff.tumblr.com/) if you feel so inclined!


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